Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

Sometimes The Devil is a gentleman.

Through the sunset of hope, Like the shapes of a dream, What paradise islands of glory gleam!

When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.

Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, - but it returneth!

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs, - To the silent wilderness, Where the soul need not repress Its music.

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

And Spring arose on the garden fair, Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere; And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

Heaven's ebon vault Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.

Poetry Love's Philosophy The fountains mingle with the river And the rivers with the ocean, The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle— Why not I with thine? See the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdain'd its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea— What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?

See the mountains kiss high Heaven And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea - What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me?

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.

I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, when the winds are breathing low, and the stars are shining bright.

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.

It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.

It is impossible that had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being. Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.

In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Let there be light! Said Liberty , And like sunrise from the sea, Athens arose!

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Blessed are those who have preserved internal sanctity of soul; who are conscious of no secret deceit; who are the same in act as they are in desire; who conceal no thought, no tendencies of thought, from their own conscience; who are faithful and sincere witnesses, before the tribunal of their own judgments, of all that passes within their mind. Such as these shall see God.

Know what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of Baptism; it is to believe in belief; it is to be so little that elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child had its fairy godmother in its soul.

Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.

I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won

Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number- Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you Ye are many-they are few.

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

Fate,Time,Occasion,Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal love.

Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are.

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

When the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven.

Far clouds of feathery gold, Shaded with deepest purple, gleam Like islands on a dark blue sea.

There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet, and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.

Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, - a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.

Man who man would be, must rule the empire of himself.

Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.

Love's very pain is sweet

a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought